g of January of the year following. During that
time the people of the South and Southeast, who had been made
homeless and penniless, were constantly trooping into Reykjavik in
hundreds and tens of hundreds. The population of the capital rose
from less than two thousand to more than twenty thousand. Where so
many were housed no man ever knew, and how they lived none can say.
Every hut, every hovel, every hole was full of human beings. Men,
women, and children crawled like vermin in every quarter. For food,
they had what fish came out of the sea, and when the frost covered
the fiord a foot deep with ice, they starved on fish bones and and
moss and seaweed.

By this time a cry for help had gone up throughout Europe, and
Denmark and England had each sent a shipload of provisions, corn and
meal and potatoes. The relief came late, the ships were caught in the
ice, and held ice-bound a long month off Reykianess, and when at
length the food for which the people famished was brought into
Reykjavik harbor, the potatoes were like slabs of leather and the
corn and meal like blocks of stone.

But even in this land of fire and frost, the Universal Mother is good
to her children, and the people lived through their distresses. By
the end of February they were trooping back to the scenes of their
former homes, for, desolate as those places were, they loved them and
clung to them still.

In the days of this awful calamity there were few that remembered
Michael Sunlocks. Jorgen Jorgensen might have had his will of him
then, and scarce anybody the wiser. That he held his hand was due
first to fear and then to contempt; fear of Copenhagen, contempt of
the man who had lost his influence over the people of Iceland. He
was wrong on both counts. Copenhagen cared nothing for the life of
Michael Sunlocks, and laughed at the revolution whereof he had been
the head and centre. But when the people of Iceland recovered from
the deadly visitation, their hearts turned back to the man who had
suffered for their sakes.

Then it appeared that through these weary months Michael Sunlocks had
been lying in the little house of detention at Reykjavik, with no man
save one man, and that was old Adam Fairbrother, to raise a voice on
his behalf, and no woman save one woman, and that was Greeba, to
cling to him in his extremity. Neither of these had been allowed to
come near to him, but both had been with him always. Again and again
old Adam had forced his